I said I’d think about it, and I paid for the coffee, and I drove home.

And I did not sleep.

I lay awake in my large quiet house and I listened to the particular silence of it, the silence I had spent nine years telling myself was peace, and for the first time in a long while I heard it for what it actually was.

It was not peace.

It was absence.

I had built a life with no sharp edges, no one who could hurt me, no one who could need me, no one whose troubles could disturb my careful calm, and I had called the resulting emptiness freedom because the word freedom was easier to live with than the word lonely.

And now, lying in the dark, I could not stop seeing a small face I had never seen, a fourteen-month-old in a group home who had been told no nineteen times, and I understood with a slow and terrible clarity that the safe empty life I had built was not something I wanted to protect.